James J. Norris - Vatican Council II Collection

An inventory of the James J. Norris - Vatican Council II Collection at The American Catholic History Research Center and University Archives

Mailing Address: The Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C. 20064

Telephone: 202-319-5065

Email: archives@mail.lib.cua.edu

URL: http://libraries.cua.edu/achrcua/index.html

Biographical Note

James Joseph Norris made a lifetime career of championing the cause of the migrant. From his childhood days helping his mother feed strangers at the backdoor of their home in Roselle Park, New Jersey, to his efforts on behalf of refugees in the post World War II era, his life was one of constant concern for people on the move.

Norris was born on August 10, 1907 in Roselle Park, New Jersey, the eldest child of James Henry Norris and Rose Elizabeth Schenk. (Henry was Norris's middle name at birth but, following Catholic tradition, he assumed the name Joseph after receiving the Sacrament of Confirmation in 1917 and used this name thereafter). In 1924, at the age of sixteen, he graduated from Battin High School in Elizabeth, New Jersey. That same year, he joined the Missionary Cenacle Apostolate (or Trinitarians) and began his studies at St. Joseph's High School Seminary in Holy Trinity, Alabama. He enrolled at The Catholic University of America (CUA) in 1926 as a seminarian, while maintaining an active role as a financial advisor for the Trinitarians' founder, Father Thomas A. Judge. His studies were interrupted in 1929 when Judge appointed him Prefect of St. Joseph's High School. In 1930, Norris became the Secretary for the Trinitarian Consultors, Treasurer of the mission community, principle agent for the order's promotional work, and fulfilled the duties of an executive assistant to Judge. During the initial years of the Great Depression, he acted as the head of finances for the Trinitarians as the order struggled to survive. Although still working diligently for the financial matters of the order, Norris went back to CUA in 1932 and received his Bachelor's Degree in 1933. Acknowledging that he did not have a vocation for the priesthood, he left the Trinitarians in 1934, although he would continue to work closely with the Catholic Church for the rest of his life.

After two years of working for an electric company, Norris found a new position in 1936 as the administrative assistant to Father Patrick O'Boyle, the Director of the Mission of the Immaculate Virgin, an orphanage and child welfare institution maintained at Mount Loretto on Staten Island. The position placed Norris in control of the mission's finances. While working at the mission, Norris began attending graduate school in 1938 at Fordham University's School of Social Service. In 1941, Norris received a position as assistant executive director for the National Catholic Community Service (NCCS), in Washington, D.C., where his primary function was to coordinate American Catholic efforts when cooperating with the US Government. The same year saw him marry Amanda Clara Tisch, daughter of Meta Maria Weickert and George Christian Tisch. The couple was married by the same Father O'Boyle who had hired Norris at Mount Loretto, and who would later become Archbishop of Washington. They were married in the Lady Chapel of Saint Patrick's Cathedral, New York City, on September 20, 1941. They would have four sons (James, Gregory, Peter, and Stephen). Only two years later, he became acting director of NCCS and resolved to make assistance for returning veterans from the war a primary concern of the agency.

Due to the manpower needs of World War II, James Norris was drafted in 1944 and entered the armed forces as a Lieutenant junior grade in the Naval Reserve. After completing Naval Training School at Princeton, New Jersey, he served as a commander of an Armed Guard Unit aboard the S.S. William Windom in the European, Atlantic, and Pacific theatres of war.

In 1945, he returned to work within the Catholic Church, this time for the War Relief Services (WRS), the overseas aid agency of the United States Catholic Church. As special assistant to the executive director, he worked with the federal government to help World War II refugees relocate to other areas of the world. Because of World War II, the majority of his energy went to refugees from Europe and Africa. In 1946, Norris was hired as European director of WRS. Touring devastated areas of Europe on behalf of WRS in the immediate postwar period, Norris was struck by the plight of millions of refugees and displaced persons. Norris was instrumental in mobilizing millions of dollars in aid from American Catholics to alleviate the suffering of the homeless that he encountered in Europe. Later, after the civil wars in both China and India, Norris would shift his focus to Asia. In 1947, Norris became director of the European branch of WRS and he and his family moved to Geneva where they would live for the next twelve years. As a response to the amount of refugees fleeing from the Soviet Block in Eastern Europe, he, together with Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, (later Pope Paul VI), helped create the International Catholic Migration Commission (ICMC), formally brought into existence by Pope Pius XII in 1951. Through diocesan and national commissions in both sending and receiving countries, the ICMC facilitated the movement of "people with countries to countries without people". Norris served as president of the International Catholic Migration Commission for twenty-three years, from the organization's inception in 1951 until 1974.

In 1954, Norris was elected president of the umbrella organization, the Standing Conference of Voluntary Agencies Working for Refugees (CVAWR). Norris played a leading role in helping organize the 1959 International Year of the Refugee to help refocus international attention on the plight of refugees as a continuing problem in the world. Norris was able to balance all three positions with WRS, ICMC, and CVAWR. In 1959, Norris and his family returned to New York from Europe, where he would continue working for Catholic Relief Services (CRS - formerly War Relief Services, which changed its name in 1955). The new vision of CRS was to assist small nations socially and economically. Norris assumed a new role within the agency as executive assistant to the executive director (Bishop Edward E. Swanstrom). Norris was now responsible for CRS' world-wide program of relief, welfare, self-help and socio-economic development. By the time of Norris' death in 1976, the annual program value was $ 256,000,000.

In 1963, James Norris was invited by Pope Paul VI to be one of the lay auditors at the Second Vatican Council in Rome. While the Second Session was underway, he seized the opportunity to actively lobby for the Council fathers to spend a segment of their time in session on the issue of poverty. Specifically, Norris wanted poverty to be a concern of the whole church, not just for the Apostolate of the Laity, he promoted the creation of an office to deal specifically with this problem, and he urged for a "world poverty day." Working with Barbara Ward and other proponents for Catholic action against world poverty, Norris was granted permission by his long-time friend, Pope Paul, to address the Council while in session. On November 5, 1964, he became the first member of the laity to participate in a council debate when he introduced Chapter Four, Paragraph 24 "De Paupertate Mundiali" in the schema on the Church in the Modern World.

In his historic speech, entitled "World Poverty and the Christian Conscience", Norris issued "a clarion call for action which would involve the creation of a structure that would devise the kind of institutions, contacts, forms of cooperation and policy which the Church can adopt, to secure full Catholic participation in the worldwide attack on poverty." Norris was convinced that the Church, as an international community of believers, could be far more effective in directing attention and resources in the fight against poverty. Norris' concerns were incorporated in Paragraph 90 of "Gaudium et Spes", the Council's Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World.

In the immediate post-Conciliar period, Norris remained at Rome in a continued effort to create a permanent office of the Holy See focused on world poverty. Norris became a member of the Post-Conciliar Commission on the Apostolate of the Laity and participated in the lobbying and consultative efforts leading to the implementation of Paragraph 90. Those efforts led to the creation by Pope Paul VI of the Pontifical Commission (later Council) "Justice and Peace" in 1967. Paul VI explained to the members of the new organism that its purpose was "to keep an alert eye, an open heart, and a ready hand for the work of charity that the Church is called upon to perform in the world". Four years later, the same Pope created the Pontifical Council "Cor Unum" to help coordinate various national Catholic relief agencies. Norris was appointed by the Pope as a charter member of both entities.

In addition to becoming the first member of the laity to participate in a Vatican Council debate, Norris also became the first layman to be named an official Papal escort when he accompanied Pope Paul VI on the Pontiff's flight to Geneva on June 10, 1969 to visit the International Labor Organization and the World Council of Churches. Paul VI also designated Norris as the Holy See's representative at the funeral of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and appointed him to participate as an "Expert" in the 1971 Synod of Bishops on the subject: Justice in the World.

Norris was also a member of the Board of Trustees of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, in Washington, D.C., and a member of the Shrine's Marian Devotion Committee. This committee was, according to John Cardinal Carberry, Archbishop of St. Louis, "the motivating force" behind the United States' Bishops Pastoral Letter: "Behold Your Mother: Woman of Faith". In his homily on the first anniversary of Norris' death, National Shrine Director Monsignor John J. Murphy recalled that "Norris' vision was responsible for the Pastoral Letter".

All of Norris' activity on behalf of the Holy See was conducted while he continued his own efforts through Catholic Relief Services and the International Catholic Migration Commission to aid the new refugees emerging from such places as Biafra, Burundi, and Vietnam. In November 1976, he was notified by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees that he was to be the recipient of UNHCR's highest humanitarian award, the Fridtjof Nansen Medal. Before the medal could be conferred, Norris, worn out by his efforts, suffered a fatal aneurysm while commuting to his CRS office in New York. He died on November 17, 1976. Two days later, his old friend, Pope Paul VI, offered Mass for the repose of his soul, and thousands of tributes and letters of condolence to Norris' widow, Amanda, poured in from every corner of the globe.

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Scope and Contents

The James J. Norris - Vatican Council II Collection consists of his professional correspondence and the materials he used while serving as a lay auditor at the Second Vatican Council. The majority of the collection comprises his involvement in the Schema on the Church in the Modern World and the Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity both as a lay auditor and as a member of a sub-commission from 1963-1967. However, there are also materials relating to other schemae of the council dating from 1960-1962 and a small amount of material directly related to the council but not produced by the Catholic Church, such as published correspondence and newspaper clippings dating from 1963-1966. The collection is divided into two series and a significant amount of the collection is written in either French, Latin, and more rarely, Italian, or Spanish.

The first series consists of the subject files of James J. Norris during his time working as a lay auditor and sub-commission member of the Second Vatican Council. Correspondence, notes, newspaper clippings, pamphlets, published documents, and speeches are among some of the material in this series. The series contains the letter of invitation to James Norris to participate in the council as a lay auditor in 1963. There is also correspondence with Msgr. Achille Glorieux regarding updates and drafts of Schema XIII, The Church in the Modern World, and with prominent lay figures involved in the council, such as Martin H. Work and Mieczyslaw de Habicht, regarding recommendations to the council.

The notes, newspaper clippings, pamphlets, and speeches, are concerned with the council and its outcomes. In some cases, Norris wrote notes directly on the drafts of schemae, and in others he wrote his notes separately. In many instances, these notes identify possible suggestions for altering Church documents. There is also a considerable amount of counciliar and post-conciliar documents primarily concerned with Schema XIII, The Church in the Modern World and The Apostolate of the Laity, including drafts of schemae and their individual chapters, commentaries, observations, voting results, and appendices.

The second series comprises documents published between 1960 and 1962 by the Vatican Council as preparatory materials for those involved in the council. These materials are written in Latin and concern topics slated for debate during the council sessions. They often represent smaller segments of larger issues, such as topics on Matrimony.

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Arrangement

The James J. Norris - Vatican Council II Collection consists of 2 series:

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Restrictions

Restrictions on Access

None.

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Administrative Information

Acquisition Information

This collection consists of two donations made by James J. Norris to the CUA Archives. He made the first deposit some time between 1965 and December 2, 1972, as acknowledged by the then Secretary of the Committee on Archives and Manuscripts, Rev. Robert Trisco, in his correspondence with Msgr. Andrew Landi, Assistant Executive Director of Catholic Relief Services (CRS). This donation consisted of the printed and manuscript material along with his correspondence dated prior to and during Vatican Council II. Norris offered the second deposit in a letter of March 22, 1974. Rev. Robert Trisco, by this time the Chairman of the Committee on Archives and Manuscripts, accepted the offer in his letter of April 8, 1974. This deposit consisted of the post-conciliar "work of the commission preparing the schema on the Church in the Modern World for the period September 14-December 8, 1965" as stated in Norris's letter.

Processing Information

Processing and EAD markup completed in 2010 by Paul W. Bush, with contributions by Joshua Sakolsky in 1996-1997 and Stephen Norris in 2009-2010.

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Related Material

For more biographical information on Norris, see Raymond J. Kupke. James J. Norris: an American Catholic Life. Thesis (Ph.D.)-- The Catholic University of America, 1995. Department of Church History.

At the American Catholic History Research Center and University Archives:

George Gilmary Higgins Papers.

Vatican Council II Collections.

At other institutions:

James J. Norris Papers (1940s-1976), University Archives, University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana.

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Index Terms

This record series is indexed under the following controlled access subject terms.

Persons:

Organizations:

Places:

Subjects:

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Bibliography

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Detailed Description of the Collection

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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Descriptive Summary

Biographical Note

Scope and Contents

Arrangement

Restrictions

Administrative Information

Related Material

Index Terms

Bibliography

Detailed Description of the Collection

Series 1: Subject Files, 1963-1967, n.d.

Series 2: Publications, 1960-1962